Tag Archives: 1979

My Life Story: 1979

Things to know up front:

You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Click the back arrow key to return to the post.

Every chapter in My Life Story includes information about me, my work, my family and my friends. It also includes information about events that took place locally and nationally, etc. that I thought important enough to include. You’ll also find that I’ve included films, musicians and recordings/videos, in addition to books that were released in a given year.

While I have included many personal photos, most of the graphic content included below is borrowed from the Internet. I do not claim to own this material. I am just adding it for educational purposes. If the owners of any of the content in the “My Life Story” series want their stuff removed, I am happy to oblige. My email address is jrdiaz@arizona.edu. Thanks!

1979 would be another remarkable year. I started the year out deciding that I needed a break from school. When I quit Salpointe in 1976, I did so on the condition that I would finish college, so I knew this was temporary, as I did not want to break my promise to my parents. I had already completed 54 units of courses and had a solid “B” average by the end of the year, and was nearly halfway done. While I was becoming wary of pursuing a profession in psychology, it remained my chosen major. I took the semester off, in part, to think about what I really wanted to do as I continued my education, and to earn more money.

Life went on. I continued working as a stocker/cashier at Fry’s and living in my little one-room efficiency apartment. I pulled back some from the partying and bar hopping, but didn’t stop completely. I had been “out” almost a whole year, since March, and while I met a few guys here and there who I thought I really liked, I hadn’t yet met anyone who I dated on a steady basis. That would change as the year progressed.

During the last couple of years of her life, my grandmother Josefa became ill with Alzheimer’s disease, and my aunt Mary took care of her. Her husband Fernando decided that he was moving the family to Los Angeles where he had found work after he had been laid off from his job here in Tucson, so aunt Mary put our grandmother in a nursing facility. My grandmother begged my mother not to leave her alone there, so my mom decided that she would take care of her at home. It was a huge burden on my mom and dad, but mom could not stand seeing my grandmother suffering in a cold hospital room all by herself. She took care of her for nearly a year.

Josefa Rascon 1903-1979

My grandmother died at the house on January 13, two days before my 20th birthday. She was 75 years old. She had always been very kind and sweet to me and was the only grandparent I ever knew. (I am working on a separate blog entry about my grandmother and her family. Stay tuned). This was the second death in my family within the past six months, and this one hit particularly hard. I was grief stricken. My aunt Dora, Uncle Armando and their daughter Tish came back to town for the funeral, as did Aunt Mary and her family. It was a sad time.

My grandmother’s obituary.
My Aunt Dora, me and my mom, January 1979.
My birthday this year was overshadowed by my grandmother’s passing, but at least my brother Charles’s kids remembered it.

A month or two later, my sister Irene’s son Anthony was baptized at St. Ambrose Church. My mom and I were his godparents. After church, we all went to mom’s house and had a little celebration. Carlos and Elaine were there, as were others. In contrast to our previous family gathering for my grandmother’s funeral, this one was a happy occasion.

My dad, Irene, Anthony my mom and I, with my sister-in-law Elaine in the background the day we baptized Anthony.
Estrella, Anthony and Edessa
Mom and I were Anthony’s padrinos.
This record was released on February 28, 1979. I still love it. It has such a “punk” sensibility.
Such a creative use of words….

Sometime in March, I decided that I was going to move back home. I don’t remember exactly why I did this. It might have been to save money. I let one of my  cousins sublet my apartment, and stayed with my parents until later in the summer.

Released in early March, this was a great movie. My radical leanings only continued to grow at this time. At some point, I became a union steward at work. Released on March 2, 1979.

The great blueman John Lee Hooker played at the Night Train on March 18,1979. I remember it like it was yesterday. I got shake his hand! Wow!

In my journal at this time, I wrote a lot about not really knowing where I was headed with my life. Even though coming out was a major milestone, I was still lonely and longed for a companion. I was tired of the bar scene and all the so called “fun” I was having, and of working all the time. I missed school, too.

Released in April, 1979. This remains one of my very favorites.
There are some tunes that only Emmylou can do justice to. This is one of them.

I continued to listen to lots of music and to go on shopping sprees for albums and books. Several albums were released in the Spring, including discs by Rickie Lee Jones and Emmylou Harris. Dylan also released a two album set, titled “Bob Dylan at Budokan”, a live recording of concerts he gave in Japan, with the same band that Richard and I saw him perform with at the McKale Memorial Center on the UA campus a few months earlier.

Released April 23, 1979. My friend Richard and I rushed to the local music store and bought copies the day it was released.
So much energy!
Because I took a semester off, I had to re-enroll at the University of Arizona. I started back up in June.

At the end of May, I met a guy named John. He was an Italian-American from New York who moved here after having served in the Air Force. He was 10 years older than me, but we hit it off. We dated regularly during the first month or so of our budding relationship, then at some point in the summer I decided to move in with him. I also re-enrolled in school and took a psychology class during the first summer session, followed by a full load of courses in the Fall. My grade point average was slowly starting to improve.

This recording, released in 1979, includes music performed at the 1977 Bread and Roses Festival. Included are performances by Buffy Sainte Marie, Jackson Browne, The Persuasions, and Malvina Reynolds. It’s a great album.
Universal Soldier, by Buffy Sainte Marie.

At some point in the Spring, I was transferred from the store I worked at on 22nd near Alvernon to another store on the south side of town, way out on the Nogales Highway. I wasn’t the only Mexican transferred. The new manager of our store, D.W. Green, was an avowed racist (he had a confederate flag in his office), and he tried to transfer all of the Mexicans out of “his” store. My friend Richard ended up getting transferred to the far southeast side at the same time. I didn’t like the manager at my new store, and when I let him know that that I was planning to take vacation time, he declined my request. I decided then that it was time to quit, so I left Fry’s for a short while. It took just a month or so for me to go back, however. I went to my old store and asked to be re-hired. In the meantime, D.W. Green, who also had a cocaine problem, had been caught stealing money from the store’s safe, and was subsequently fired. I was quickly re-hired and stayed with Fry’s for another 7 years, long enough to be vested in the company’s pension plan.

I listened a lot to Joni Mitchell in this period of my life. She had started out as a “folkie” but then became more daring in her musicianship and by 1979, was recording jazz. I had all of her albums. The album, “Mingus”, was released at this time. My record collection only continued to grow, as did my book collection. I loved reading both novels and non-fiction.

Mingus was released on June 13, 1979. The critics had a really hard time with it.

I was also still close to my friend Sylvia, although I could tell that she didn’t approve much of  my “new” lifestyle. She was still very much into wanting to be a nun at the time. My other friends, Jim and Judy moved to Missouri, and Rose and Teri had drifted away several months earlier. It was more my doing than theirs, as I was busy celebrating my new found freedom as a gay man, and I didn’t respond to their letters as consistently as I had before. Ron and Jane were still around, and I remember at one point I worked for Jane at her bookstore, Campana Books. The two of them have always been supportive and reliable friends. I’m forever grateful.

This album was released on July 1, 1979. By this time, I had all of Joan Baez’s records.
Baez wrote this song using song titles from tunes she recorded way back at the start of her career in the early 60’s.
I clearly remember how nervous I was when I bought this book. It was at the UA affiliated bookstore on Park and University. It was one of the very first gay books I ever bought.

My friend Richard and I, while not as close as we once were, continued hanging out together too. We partied a lot, and listened to music together. Our friends, Ron Burch and Sandy Hernandez, decided to tie the knot, and their wedding was a lot of fun. Richard was Ron’s best man. They had been friends since grade school, and at this time Richard lived with Ron and Sandy in a house just south of Speedway near Alvernon. We had lots of parties there.

The wedding was a blast. Sandy is on the far left, followed by Richard and Ronnie The young woman in the photo with Richard was Sandy’s Maid of Honor. I never knew her name.
Christopher Street was a gay arts and culture magazine published in New York in the 70s and 80s. The UA library had a subscription to it, and I copied the article on Joan Baez. It was a great article, filled with photos and lots of interesting quotes. Unfortunately, the photocopy I made way back when faded over time, and for years I’ve been looking to replace it with an original copy of the magazine. I was finally able to purchase a copy of the magazine in March, 2021.
This is one of the creepiest movies I’ve ever seen. Released on 8/15/79.
Slow Train Coming, Dylan’s first gospel record, was released on August 20, 1979.
This album was well recorded and sounds just great.
I continued taking classes in psychology, since that was my major, but I also took several elective courses in literature, and did better in those classes than I did in psychology. The weight training course was fun too, and by the end of the semester, I was looking rather buff, and feeling very good about it.
I loved this album. It was released in August, 1979.
I love this song.

John and I lived in an apartment on Elm St just east of Tucson Blvd. for a short while, but we left because some guy walked by our front window one afternoon, glanced over, and saw us kissing on the couch, and it freaked him out. Later that night, he showed up again, sounding very drunk and very angry, yelling at us at the top of his lungs to come outside. He wanted to kill us, or so it felt. John and I were fearful for our lives. The next day the landlords asked us to leave.  We could have protested, but we feared for our safety. We got out of there as fast as we could, and moved into a guest house on S. Warren, a couple of blocks south of Broadway near Campbell, that belonged to another gay man, and things felt much safer there. As I’ve said once already, being gay back then was sure a lot different from what it’s like now.

John and I at his staff picnic at Randolph Park, Autumn, 1979.
Playing volleyball in the park.
It was a fun day…

Being 10 years apart had its disadvantages, but was also beneficial in many ways. I was very happy and in love. John had a lot of friends and over time, they’d become my friends too. These guys were usually several years older than me, and I learned a lot about gay history and culture from them. We saw lots of movies together, including The Rose, La Cage Aux Folles, and the Rocky Horror Picture show.

This was such a fun movie! The original…
I think I saw this at the Loft on 6th St. It played there on Friday nights at midnight and had a big cult following.
Dennis Krenek was a friend of John’s with whom I remained close even after John and I split up. He was an occupational therapist, and I interned with him at the Southern Arizona Mental Health Center while in college. He died of AIDS in 1986.
Aretha Franklin, La Diva. Released September 6, 1979.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFNmlEdXVj0
Aretha wrote this song.

By this time, I was also a big Aretha Franklin fan, and was starting to acquire as many albums of hers as possible. She started out recording for Columbia Records in the very early 60’s and then switched to the Atlantic label in 1967, the year she hit it big with her single, “Respect”. This recording, her last for the Atlantic label, was released in early September, and was a major flop. It would take a change in management and record labels and a few more years for Aretha to bounce back from what was considered a low point in her recording career. This album included two disco songs that didn’t go anywhere at all, lending creedence to the popular phrase, “disco sucks”.

This album, released in September, 1979, is fantastic. Bonoff wrote several songs that Linda Ronstadt recorded for her album “Hasten Down the Wind”, including “Try Me Again” and “Lose Again”.
This is just one of many great tunes on this album.

John was a big music buff too, and he loved jazz and Frank Sinatra. He turned me on to singers like Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, and I too became a big fan, (but I drew the line at Sinatra. I couldn’t stand him). We also listened to new music like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, Bat Out of Hell, by Meatloaf, and the recent album by The Cars. I still loved my Bob Dylan, however, and bought Slow Train Coming as soon as it came out. In December, one of John’s friends got us front row seats to see Dylan live at the Tucson Community Center Music Hall. It was an incredible show, with some very talented musicians. Dylan played all of the songs from Slow Train Coming, and the singers he had with him were amazing as they belted out one gospel tune after another.

Once John introduced me to her music, I fell in love with Lady Day, and began to collect all of her recordings.
I fell in love with her and learned all I could about her within a short span of time. It kept me busy!
This article came out on September 13, 1979 in the Arizona Daily Star. It features my high school teacher and friend, Jane Cruz and her bookstore, Campana Books.
I loved this bookstore. I even worked there briefly one summer.
Released on October 2, 1979, this Bob Marley album remains my favorite of all. The song that follows is also my favorite.
The first National Gay Rights March on Washington drew between 75,000 and 125,000 participants. The goal of the march was to bring attention to the fight for equal rights and protection against discrimination for gay people.
She was the best disco diva of them all. This recording is filled with one hit after another. Released on 10-15-79.
We just had to see this movie when it came out in early November. Bette Midler was idolized within the gay world.
A review of Dylan’s December 9th show. I was in the 2nd row! Wow!
The Clash were exceptional. I usually didn’t listen to punk or anything too hardcore sounding, but their politics were spot on. This was released on 12/14/79.
My grades were continuing to improve, and by the end of the semester, I had enough credits to move from sophomore status to junior status. I was on my way!
Released on 12/19/79. A great film with incomparable actors.
John turned me on to Sarah Vaughan. These were recorded in August and September, and soon thereafter released. I bought both albums sometime in 1980, I believe, after John and I broke up.

By the end of the year, John and I had lived together for almost five months. We were both very busy. I was working and going to school, and John had two jobs. We clearly loved each other, but it wasn’t all perfect, however, and the relationship had its rocky moments. John was sometimes bossy and moody, and I had a hard time standing up for myself at times. Nevertheless, my dream to have a “lover” had come true, and we did have a great time together. I was happy, and did well in school and continued to work at Fry’s as the year came to a close.

My cousin Tish sent this Christmas card to me from California. When she came to town for my grandmother’s funeral at the beginning of the year, I asked her about the Harvey Milk assassination, which had just occurred the previous November. She told me she had attended the vigil for him and said there were thousands of people there, all with candles lit, and that it was a beautiful sight. She was one of the only family members who knew I was gay at the time.

Harvey Milk vigil, San Francisco.

Overall, 1979 ended on a high note, as things were going well with John and me. I had new friends too, that included Dennis Krenek, Leonard Brown and his partner, Virgil, and others such as Kidd, Leonor and Shirley. These were all people that John had introduced me to, and they were all very nice.  My old friends Richard and his brother Albert were still around too and I’d hook up with them occasionally, but John and I didn’t hang out with them together much at all.